Biometric data generally holds a wealth of unique identifying information that may be used in a variety of different ways, but perhaps most significantly for security applications. As biometric data is not easily counterfeited and is uniquely identifiable it is well suited for security purposes. Fingerprint sensors and retina scanners, for example, are relatively common biometric data collecting devices that are used to collect biometric data that is typically used for security purposes. Specifically, the biometric data collected by such sensors is unique to each user so that it may be used by a computing device to help identify a user and authenticate a user to a particular device and/or application accessible via the device.
One challenge of using biometric data, however, is the large amount of biometric data that may be collected and evaluated to determine a match. In particular, it may be both time consuming and computationally expensive to perform a brute force evaluation and comparison between a collected fingerprint and a fingerprint database. The time delay for such a comparison alone would likely diminish a user experience of a device equipped with such functionality, especially when the user wants access to the device.